Rants and musings, without care for substance.
Posted in computing, software, troubleshooting on Feb 28th, 2011
When attempting to use TaxAct 2010 with CrossOver Mac, I experienced the same frame buffer problems as last year with Tax Act 2009. It makes the software pretty useless, since without the Q&A you may as well fill in the paper tax forms.
Fortunately, the same fix worked this year. Just install Internet Explorer 6.0 to [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Oct 28th, 2010
A few months ago Verizon decided to block outgoing SMTP connections from its residential customers. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got dial-up, DSL, or FIOS. The thinking was that zombies could be prevented from sending out spam. I’m not sure how that strategy is working out, but it does make getting daily reports from your [...]
I don’t know how old this hard disk is, but I’d guess 25-30 years. No telling its capacity, but it’s physical dimensions are huge; it has carrying handles. You can also see the pen and the mouse on the lab bench, for scale.
The chassis appears to be forged out of steel.
If you know how small [...]
As part of my undergraduate work at RIT, I took a course called Internetworking. While the classroom portion went into the guts of physical media specifications and computer networking, the lab component was by far more fun. We learned how to configure Cisco routers and switches. We learned how to do packet captures. We learned [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Jul 18th, 2010
For the last couple days, the cron job for updating my SpamAssassin rule set has been throwing an error:
Argument “1.39_01″ isn’t numeric in subroutine entry at /usr/bin/sa-update line 81.
It turns out this is a bug with the Archive::Tar module that was released a few days ago, not SpamAssassin or CentOS per se. The fix — [...]
Quite a bit of heavy reading this week, mostly pertaining to cryptography. More interesting (and a lot more accessible), there’s slick little Flash video showing how Simple Power Analysis (SPA) can conceivably reveal the bits of a cryptographic key as they’re being processed on-chip. Inexpensive and quite scary, assuming you have physical access. Sadly, there’s [...]
Posted in computing, things i'd like to see on May 9th, 2010
Vixie cron supports jitter, an extremely easy way to stagger cron jobs and prevent them all from starting at once. From the FreeBSD cron man page:
-j jitter
Enable time jitter. Prior to executing commands, cron will sleep a random number of seconds in the range [...]
Posted in computing on Apr 10th, 2010
I’ve been pulling down some legal Nine Inch Nails media via torrent and it appears that the Actiontec router that Verizon provides isn’t quite up to the task.
I remotely monitor the response times and lately I’ve been getting all sorts of alerts that corresponds to my download periods.
PING WARNING - Packet loss = 0%, RTA [...]
Posted in computing on Mar 29th, 2010
For the systems that I haven’t upgraded to Postfix, a reminder on how to force Sendmail to transfer queued mail. Usually when the initial attempt failed due to name service issues or connectivity issues between the system and the remote smart host.
sendmail -qf -v
This is included in the man page, but hiding with half a [...]
I own and operate the server that hosts this blog.
In the world of NearlyFreeSpeech.net, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, all of which are more fault tolerant, why would I bother running my own?
Because it allows me, my close friends and family to do whatever the heck we what. It gives us options.
If someone needs a new [...]
Posted in computing, troubleshooting on Feb 15th, 2010
When I set up software RAID, I have any errors sent to me via email. I recently found the following email in my inbox.
From: mdadm monitoring
To: root@foo.tld
Subject: DegradedArray event on /dev/md0:foo.tld
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on foo.tld
A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.
Faithfully yours, etc.
That’s it. [...]
Posted in computing on Jan 18th, 2010
I accumulate virtual hosts. It’s a problem.
Inspired by a new DNS toy that I found last night, I went on a cleaning spree early this morning. Rather than perpetuating the stockpile of legacy domains, I wiped out nine virtual hosts. None of them would have worked anyway, unless someone had the names hard-coded into their [...]
Posted in coding, complaints, computing, humor on Jan 15th, 2010
Words. Strung together and stuff.
What the world needs now
is a new scripting language
like I need a hole in my head
Apologies to Cracker.
Posted in computing on Jan 7th, 2010
The command line switches to WUAUCLT — the Windows Update Automatic Updates client — are documented, just not very coherently. There’s quite a few of them, but the only ones I need regularly are the ones to force update checks. They work with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, though they make work on [...]
Posted in complaints, computing, software on Jan 4th, 2010
A few days before January 1st of 2010, I was migrated to Microsoft Office 2007. So far, I’m not too impressed.
After a few days usage, I’ve found Office 2007 to be softer looking, slower performing, and visually bluer than Office 2003. It appears like Microsoft attempted to do away with all things sharp, both by [...]
advertising annapolis baltimore bars bbq beer blogs books cars cheese chicken chinese columbia concerts contests driving dvd email flickr food gasoline google linux money movies music networking office phones photos pizza politics privacy quotes restaurants reviews rnr sandwiches snow television travel verizon video weather youtube